The Golden Shore

California's Love Affair With the Sea

Recently a friend invited me to surf a spot usually off-limits to outsiders. I won't name it, or even reveal its general location, but after several hours of sharing near-perfect waves along a relatively unspoiled piece of shoreline, I found myself consumed by an overwhelming love for my home state. You can have Hawaii, I thought, you can keep Fiji - I love California. It was as chauvinistic as I've ever let myself feel about any place, inspired wholly by that magical zone where the land meets the sea.

Which is to say that I understand the spirit behind the title of Bay Area writer David Helvarg's latest book, "The Golden Shore: California's Love Affair With the Sea." Having read its contents, however, I must declare that if California is indeed having a love affair with the sea, we're going to need couples therapy.

In a dozen chapters covering everything from the major ports to kelp forests to naval history, Helvarg employs a variety of writerly modes - history, travelogue, journalism - to paint a comprehensive portrait of California's sometimes rosy, often tumultuous relationship with its watery neighbor to the west.

If he's not entirely successful, it's because the scope of this book could consume a thousand pages. The historical sections, especially, suffer from a sort of survey-course syndrome, encapsulating one development after another in a way that flattens their significance.

Given Helvarg's environmental credentials - he is the founder and executive director of the Blue Frontier Foundation, a Washington, D.C., organization working for ocean and coastal conservation - it's not surprising that his book shines brightest when it focuses on oceanography, activism and the struggle over the fate of our coastal resources.

First of all, there's no question we've been an abusive partner. Helvarg shares myriad anecdotes about the way we've stripped the coast of resources - animal, vegetable and mineral. We've used it as our trash can and our toilet. We've murdered native peoples. We've overfished and overhunted and introduced invasive species. We've spilled everything you can imagine into the water - including not just oil and urban runoff, but tens of thousands of barrels of radioactive and toxic waste. (Between 1946 and 1970, those went intentionally into the Gulf of the Farallones, now a national marine sanctuary.)

Consider this: At one point, Los Angeles' harbor was so polluted that boaters would simply cruise up to the main channel to clean their hulls - the lack of oxygen in the water would kill off whatever barnacles or kelp were stuck to their boats.

Or this: Leptospirosis, a bacterial infection that causes kidney failure, is found in the United States mainly among two groups: slaughterhouse workers and surfers. There's a factoid I wish I could unknow.

It's not all bad news. Helvarg is particularly gifted at profiling individuals who are doing their part on behalf of the environment, as when he visits a wildlife station on the Farallon Islands where scientists weigh guillemot and auklet chicks to track changes in the marine habitat. A tiny bird in a bag attached to a scale sings a song, it turns out, of global warming.

And a brief section covering the development of Sea Ranch in Sonoma County turns into a bona fide nail-biter about the grassroots movement to create the California Coastal Commission, complete with PR flacks in limousines shadowing activists on bicycles. You'll never again take for granted the law allowing public access to our entire coastline.

If there's a narrative here, it's one of a culture beginning to wake up to its relationship with its natural environment. Thanks to the efforts of conservationists, lawmakers and scientists, our great white sharks are returning in larger numbers. (Good for the ecosystem, Helvarg points out, bad for recreational users.) Pinnipeds are making a recovery. The ports are polluting less - in the water and the air.

Even the military, not known for its environmentalism, now suspends rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base during the four-month pupping season for seals and seal lions.

Whether he's giving us the play-by-play of a local campaign to stop a casino development on long-neglected Point Molate in the San Francisco Bay or explaining how the unique bathymetry and ocean currents off our coast result in a rich marine environment that some call the "Serengeti of the ocean," Helvarg just might make you feel optimistic about the future. At least until you see the next cigarette butt go flying out someone's car window, destined for a storm drain to the sea.

For me, the book served as a reminder that a true love affair cannot be one-sided. What I experienced that day at the beach was only half of the equation. We've got to do our part; we owe it to the sea. After all, without it, California would be "little more than a long skinny clone of Nevada."

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